Who Needs Hashtags Anymore

Hashtags are unattractive, easily abused, the butt of jokes, and yet more popular than ever.

As a fixture in online and popular culture, the hashtagâs ascent to near-total saturation is improbable and puzzling. Devised andÂ implementedÂ by early Twitter users, hashtags werenât a part of Twitterâs original infrastructure. Today, the hashtagâs hostile takeover is nearly complete, as the unwieldy construction has found its way onto TV screens, basketball courts, and, most regrettably, into our spoken lexicon.

But what was created as a means for organization, discovery, and reach may have outlived its usefulness.

Some journalists, likeÂ New York TimesÂ social media staff editor Daniel Victor, argue that, when it comes to hashtags, the idea of extended reach is exaggerated and perhaps even a myth. âGetting any single personâs attention is just short of impossible, like a single Niagara droplet screaming for notice as it shoots down the falls,âÂ he wroteÂ last March of the hashtagâs ability to increase visibility during large-scale events like the Super Bowl.

âThere are two things that matter when it comes to reach,â Victor told BuzzFeed. âThe first is how many are using the tag, and then how many are searching for it. We have absolutely no available data on how often these tags are searched. Really, thatâs all that matters. If nobody is searching, nobody is going to find it.â

While Victor admits that the tags tend to work for journalists on a small scale at Q&As, events, and conferences, he notes that when it comes to doing journalism with and on social media, hashtags arenât always a helpful resource. âIf there is a shooting at the Empire State Building â as there was last summer â Iâd much rather use Geofeedia or an advanced Twitter search to find eyewitnesses close to the scene. That or Iâd search phrases like âIâm OKâ or Iâm safeâ or âI was there.â Often with a generic hashtag like #EmpireStateBuilding, youâll just get links and headlines for a big news event.â

Victor isnât alone. An overwhelming number of online journalists BuzzFeed spoke with expressed ambivalence or even disdain for hashtags, noting that they tried to avoid using them unless necessary. Not exactly a vote of confidence from people largely tasked with reporting on and making sense of the greater social media conversation.

And what about marketing? Sponsored hashtags were the first and continue to be the most critical part of Twitterâs advertising platform. In fact, theÂ marketing communityÂ has been credited (or blamed) for the rise of the hashtag, which they used to, in their words, âown a piece of the conversation.â

Even here, fatigue appears to be setting in. More often than not, itâs near impossible for companies and public figures to control and shape social conversations, especially around prescribed terms. In many cases, branded hashtags haveÂ backfiredÂ against their creators â so much so that thereâs a name for the phenomenon: the âbashtag.â

Amy Vernon, general manager of social marketing for Internet Media Labs and a proud supporter of hashtags, regards them as âthe atomic and one of the single most important elements of social media,â yet still notes that over-corporatized or brand-created hashtags are mostly destined for failure. âI wouldnât use a branded hashtag unless I had a very specific message to convey,â she said. âThe brands that do it right understand that theyâre about the conversation and join it when it makes sense to instead of trying to form and own the conversation.â

A hijacked portion of Subwayâs #15yrwinningstreak promoted trend.

Even in politics, where hashtags littered the online conversation for years, their utility is being questioned. Hashtags caused a fair share of headaches during last yearâs presidential campaign. The Obama campaignâs digital outbound director for social media Laura Olin told BuzzFeed that âhashtags had only two real viable uses for my team during the campaign,â which included getting messages trending during high-visibility moments like debates, and injecting voter voices into specific issue campaigns like the White Houseâs #40dollars campaign. The rest of the time, she notes, hashtags were little more than a depository for, letâs say,Â unhelpfulcontent.

âThose relevant-use cases represented maybe 5% of the period of the election,â Olin said. âThe rest of the time, hashtags were ugly, irrelevant noise at best, or, at worst, an outlet for pointless anti-Obama hashtag games (your typical #NextObamaBook or #ObamaMovies thing) with plenty of ignorant and sometimes outright racist content that, if you made the mistake of peeking in, just served to make you feel depressed about the state of humanity.â

Romney digital director Zac Moffatt echoed a similar lesson: âIf youâre looking to control the conversation, then hashtags are potentially dangerous,â he said. âBut if youâre looking to seed conversations and give the users a signal to rally around, sometimes they can play that role.â But Moffatt also notes that for visible figures and companies of all kinds, hashtag âreachâ is a two-way street. âYouâre increasing reach, but thatâs also because people are talking about it in a non-positive way.â Moffatt told BuzzFeed he noticed that negative hashtags â like the popular #ObamaIsntWorking â saw better results throughout the campaign.

Look no further than Anthony Weinerâs recently revived Twitter feed, which, with its excessive hashtags and other grammatical BlackBerryisms, looks and feels strangely out-of-date.

Hashtags, as weâve come to know them, will linger for some time. Twitter still sells them to advertisers, and there are multiple reports that Facebook is planning to bring them onto its social network in the coming months.

And yet itâs becoming easier by the day to imagine a world without theÂ octothorp. Some hashtag Twitter searches â see below â now turn up not just matching tags but untagged keywords, suggesting that even Twitterâs uses for the hashtag are decreasing.

âAs Twitter search and trend detection has gotten better, could be that hashtagsâ days are already numbered as even that âatomic unitâ of Twitter. Instead itâs just words,â Olin said. âGo figure.â

âTwitter users also seem to continually be changing the way they use the platform â for example, people are using favorites, a long-standing feature, differently now than they were even a year or two years ago,â she said. âSo I wouldnât be surprised if hashtag use changed in ways we canât even anticipate.â